To some .NET developers, COM is a dirty little turd that no matter how hard they try, it won’t flush. Microsoft and other vendors keep on pumping out new COM based SDKs year after year. Sometimes these APIs are directly consumable by .NET and in the case they are not, you can visibly see developers’ anxiety rise at the thought of working directly with COM. There’s a lot of beef with a lot of developers about COM. Where does it all come from?

“I did XYZ in COM and I couldn’t make it work, so COM sucks”, “I used ABC COM technology and it was way too overcomplicated” and the variations are things that have been heard and are wide spread. While the fact that so many developers have these grievances about COM is generally relevant, it is also not very fair. Imagine looking at .NET for the first time and diving right into WCF or Workflow and saying “I got burned by it, so .NET blows”.